


Monochrome Girl in a Technicolor World

by pepperfield



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alpha Session, Gen, Post-Scratch
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-04-05
Updated: 2012-05-03
Packaged: 2017-11-03 02:10:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/375935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pepperfield/pseuds/pepperfield
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It isn't your real name. It isn't your name at all, in any sense, but somehow you suspect that perhaps it used to be. In a different life, maybe, given by someone who loved you, in her own way.</p>
<p>You hadn't understood that, before; at least, not until it was too late. This time, it won't be any different. You won't be seeing her again. Not in this lifetime, anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

You don't land in a lake. Your meteor crashes a little closer to civilization, on a brisk December afternoon, and your existence is met with the bafflement of local authorities. There is no enterprising young scientist to find you among the wreckage, and you are eventually whisked away to the hospital. You are adopted a few months later by a well-meaning, but bland, young couple, and soon find yourself living in the nameless suburbs of New York. The year is 1972, and the name they give you is not Rose Lalonde.  
  
\--  
  
Your parents are good people. They are warm and attentive, and they dote on you, but in the way parents do when they don't understand their children. You are, for the most part, a good child. You're somewhat prone to over-analyzing the actions of others while being rather private about your own matters, which people find off-putting. This isn't so unusual though, and you form some tenuous friendships at your school.  
  
Still, there's something distant about you, something almost dark, that your parents and your friends can't comprehend. You carry yourself like a girl too ancient for her own skin. You walk like a girl who has embraced death. You smile - well, you don't really smile at anyone. On a good day, someone might provoke a smirk, or even better, startle the ghost of a smile out of you.  
  
But that's exactly it: you are a ghost floating aimlessly through a world that's just  _different_ in all the wrong ways. You don't know if you're alive. If this is what living feels like, then what was it that you experienced before this? What are those fleeting glimpses of  _something_ , those sudden heart-wrenching bursts of emotion that grip you without warning? Logically, you know that you can't have lived through the nebulous, half-formed memories that haunt you; you're barely a teenager. You've lived your whole life in  ~~Rainbow Falls, right above the river, surrounded by the forest and stuck in a house alone with no one but your cat and your mo~~  
  
You've lived your whole life in some tiny town in New York, and the most exciting thing that's ever happened to you was finding a book on cosmological horrors in your local library.  
  
\--  
  
When you were four years old, you asked your parents for a cat. You told them he had to be black and preferably good at listening. Your parents had frowned at each other, before your mother turned to you. It appeared that she was terribly allergic to cats, but maybe when you were a little older, they could consider buying you some fish. They took you out for ice cream as an apology, and you tried to forget about why this had been so important to you.  
  
\--  
  
You try out several hobbies as you grow older. The violin soon becomes your instrument of choice, and you occasionally ~~lay down some sick beats~~  perform in a recital or two, sometimes to the accompaniment of a piano, which makes you inexplicably wistful.   
  
Writing creative fiction is your true calling, you think. You're especially taken with magic and wizards, so you start a journal to try and capture this one story that's been percolating in your head for a while. It seems to be going well, though your prose might be a bit too...purple.  
  
Baking does not stick; there's something vaguely unsettling about the activity, especially when you aren't making things from scratch. Your father brings you boxes of Betty Crocker cake mix, but you can't bring yourself to open the garishly red packages. They find their way into the trash can. In any case, you aren't even interested in cakes, or other assorted baked sundries. Your culinary endeavors began one hot summer day, when you woke up to the sound of frogs in your yard, and the only thing you could think about was pumpkins. Pumpkins, pumpkins, pumpkins. It was all a bit nonsensical; pumpkins weren't even in season at the time. But you weren't up for writing about Zazzerpan that day, so you decided to indulge your newfound obsession with this fruit that you had honestly never even seen before in real life. You couldn't simply just jump right into making pumpkin pie though, so you began with the basics. After staring down Betty Crocker a few too many times over the next couple of weeks, you give up. You forget about the pumpkin pie and the green eyed dream girl who had started the whole affair.  
  
\--  
  
You do, however, take quite well to knitting, to your surprise. You make enough scarves for your whole family, and a neat rectangular cozy that you're not quite sure what to do with. More impressively, you manage to knit some new limbs for an old plush bunny you used to love. Not only is it ragged, it's also kind of oily and disgusting. But this is the one thing you crashlanded onto this world with, and you steadfastly refused to let it go when the police, the doctors, and your parents tried to remove it. No one knows where it could have come from (for that matter, no one knows where  _you_ could have come from), but it looks to you like a trite gift a father might give his daughter, if you ignore the oil stains. You knit new life into it, and place it on a shelf above your bed. Maybe someday you'll pass it on to your own precocious meteor baby. Ha.  
  
\--  
  
Dreams are maddeningly elusive to you. Everything is jumbled and disorganized, reduced to a melancholy haze of color and nostalgia. You always wake with no clear recollection of your dreams, just snippets of distressingly life-like sensory information. The gentle whisper of wind in your hair. A thick, heavy heat and the endless click of gears. The smell of blood splattered against a lightly perfumed scarf.   
  
\--  
  
 _"You will be resigned to absolute oblivion."_  
  
You hear this not-lie in your dreams with alarming frequency. It is infuriating.


	2. Chapter 2

When you are sixteen, your life changes forever. It is late June, and you have just finished your classes for the year. High school hasn't been much different from your earlier stages of education. You have published some works in your school literary journal, and you spend your time with a small group of friends who you would consider close, but not close enough to confide in. Your dreams have been becoming more vivid lately, and more worryingly, you've started to develop strong headaches.  
  
Your parents decide to take a family trip to give you a change of pace. They're afraid that maybe the atmosphere may be to blame for your condition. It's been an unusually cold year, and you haven't been getting much sun. So the three of you drive down to Texas, to visit some of your parents' friends from college. You think that going to Texas in the summer might be overkill, but you don't really object.   
  
One Wednesday afternoon, the adults have gone to watch a recently released film. You beg off it, and your parents, with some reluctance, allow you to visit the local city landmarks on your own. You've been sitting under the shadow of a wall as you recover from the midday sun. You've been watching people walk by as you refresh yourself, but now your water bottle is empty, so you rise in order to go recycle it. As you turn, you accidentally collide with a young man. Your head whacks his with a considerable amount of force, and he falls to the ground with a curse and a clattering sound. You stumble backwards and try to regain balance, but the painful strike and the sweltering heat only serve to exacerbate your headache.  
  
After a few seconds, the throbbing subsides and you turn to the young man. "I must apologize, I wasn't paying enough attention to..." But your words trail off as you finally take in the person before your eyes.  
  
The boy on the ground, who can't be much older than you, has retrieved his fallen object, which was apparently a pair of large sunglasses. But even though you can't make out the line of his sight you know he must be staring straight at you. His mouth is openly gaping, but you can't really fault him for that, since you seem to be in much the same position. Because there is simultaneously nothing and everything remarkable about this boy.  
  
The boy from your memories. Your brother.  
  
Sandy hair, thin arms, a smattering of freckles across his cheeks, eyes hidden behind the protection of his dark glasses. He doesn't look extraordinary, but that's what makes the fact that  _you know him_ more amazing. There is absolutely no doubt in your mind. You have met him before, somewhere, sometime before now.  
  
You died together.  
  
He breaks the silence first. "You know, I didn't expect that you of all people could ever be at a loss for words, Lalonde." The moment the words leave his lips he freezes, as do you.  
  
 _He knows your name._  
  
If you needed any proof before, you certainly don't now. Your lips quirk upwards into a small smirk. "Once again, I apologize, Strider," the name falls effortlessly out and he startles almost imperceptibly, "I wasn't watching where I was going. Though, I suspect the same could be said of you."  
  
"Whoa, hold up on the baseless accusations for a minute. How do you know I wasn't fully aware of what I was doing the whole time?" He dusts himself off and stands up, his face oriented towards you all the while.   
  
"Are you telling me you intentionally ran face first into my head? If so, I demand compensation for my splitting headache." You have no idea what has suddenly happened to you. In the space of two minutes your life has folded in on itself and exploded into a confetti of utter chaos. Yet, somehow you are at peace, standing here under the swell of Earth's yellow sun, exchanging banter with someone who you've never met before but  _know_  with an unbreakable certainty. You fight the need to reach out and touch him, to make sure that you haven't just gone completely off the deep end in every way.  
  
"Okay, fine, I can do that. You up for some ice cream? I can't believe I'm saying this, but we should probably talk." He shakes his head, and you smile, for the first time in years, as you follow this brother-stranger to the nearest ice cream store.  
  
\--  
  
You learn that his name is not Dave Strider, exactly like how your name is not Rose Lalonde. You both agree to call each other by these names anyway, because doing anything else feels fundamentally wrong. He landed on Earth, on a meteor, or course, one day before you, and was sent through a series of foster homes until his current one. His foster parents are "okay, but it's not the same as, well," but you don't find out who they don't live up to. He stops talking momentarily, before telling you about his home life. You think you understand; you care about your parents, but there's always been something missing. Something negligent, but warm; a feeling of frustration and rebellion and bitterness and over-indulgence and passive-aggressive barbs. A feeling of love.  
  
You want to ask, "Did you hate him like I hated her? Do you resent what he made you into, what you thought you had to live up to, what you thought you stole from him? Do you miss him like I miss her?" But you don't; he doesn't owe you any answers.  
  
He tells you that people don't really understand irony, which doesn't surprise you. You ask him why he's committed to upholding this image of himself, but he shrugs. It's who he is, as much as everything under the irony is also part of his identity. Besides, it's hard to flesh out his other interests; he won't be becoming a DJ anytime soon, and although he draws comics, without an easy way to distribute them, his art isn't very popular yet. He does still take and develop his own photos, with the help of the darkroom at his school.  
  
He's been trying on and off to play the piano and the bass for the last few years, but he isn't really getting anywhere. He likes to take pictures of crows and weird dead things and clouds and constellations. He gets a bit flustered when you question him too closely, but he passes it off with an affected nonchalance. He is all the bits and pieces you remember, but displaced through time. You think he might think the same of you, when you tell him about your knitting and your writing projects and the cat you never had.  
  
The two of you don't stop talking until 5:00, and that's only because you realize that you should be rejoining your parents. You exchange home phone numbers and agree to meet again tomorrow at the same place. As you're both turning to go your separate ways, he calls out to you, "Rose. It was good to see you again."  
  
 _I'm glad I found you. I'm glad you remember me. Even if we're alone, we can be alone in this unfamiliar world together._  
  
You smile, for the second time. "Yes, it was, Dave. I'll see you tomorrow."


	3. Chapter 3

That night, you dream more clearly than you ever have. You are standing in a large, empty mansion. Slowly, you make your way through the rooms, but each is as empty as the last. There is nothing there, no furniture, no dust, no signs of life. Finally, you reach the last room, and as you open the heavy oak doors, you notice a woman standing by the window, watching the gray rain endlessly fall. She doesn't turn, or give any indication of having heard you enter the room. Her silhouette is sharp, but elegant. Her shadow looks like it was cut cleanly out of a pane of darkness. She seems, in this subconscious world, so close, and this frightens you. You do not move any farther into the room.   
  
"There can be no light in the void, my dear. We will be destined to circle around each other forever, never quite connecting. We have been condemned to this fate, no matter the iteration." Her voice is almost exactly how you remember it, but there's a quality to it you don't recognize.   
  
She sounds almost sad.   
  
"Rose, I'll always do what's best for you. Even if you never remember or understand, it doesn't make it any less true." She finally looks away from the window, at you. Taking a step forward, she begins to say something else, but you can't hear her, because you've woken up.   
  
You clutch your thin sheets to yourself as you stare helplessly at the summer moon, trying to hold onto the escaping tendrils of your dream, to understand what those final words were.   
  
\--   
  
Your parents are surprised, but actually rather pleased that you've made a friend in Texas. You introduce Dave briefly to them before the two of you set off for your impromptu Strider-style tour of the city. On your walk, you compare experiences, trying to piece together a more coherent picture of the lives you both now know you must have lived. Since seeing each other, a whole flood of memories has returned to both of you, but it's still not enough. You know you played a game that ended the world with two other friends. You both have a stronger sense of one another than those two mysterious ghost children that dance in and out of your thoughts, but that's to be expected.   
  
"He had blue eyes," you tell Dave, "darker than the sky, but brighter than the sea. He liked to laugh, I think. He kept joking, up until..." Until what? You can see the scene in your head, with all the important parts blurred out; the memory is overcast with a strange, impenetrable darkness, but you have no idea why. You curse your own fallible mind.   
  
Dave nods, without pushing you for more information. You both know that neither of you can control how much you recall. "That seems like him. She giggled all the damn time too. Except when she was shooting. Worked a gun like a fucking pro." You can almost hear her excited, bubbling laugh, and you feel the gentle warmth of fondness, even if you can't quite grasp everything about her yet.   
  
The two of you pause in a small park away from the city's main streets, and sit down on a bench, watching young families enjoy the day. Dave explains his comic to you, and tells you about the girl he can't seem to get out of his mind. "You don't understand, Lalonde, it's like no matter how hard I try, it's just not shitty enough. It's surreal how fucking terrible my drawings are, but I can't get the cackling to stop." You aren't quite sure how to console him, so you settle for a pat on the arm.   
  
"If it makes you feel any better, sometimes I imagine my fashion choices are being judged by someone who hasn't quite grasped exactly how to use sarcasm." It doesn't really make Dave feel better.   
  
You continue on your way, winding through playgrounds and alleyways, past shopfronts and rundown theaters. Sometimes you both fall quiet, trying to digest the information you've received, information that should have always been yours. After one such silence, he says this, "I remember dying. A lot." His voice is frank, but he doesn't look at you, just watches the crows flocking overhead. Dave knows more about the game than you do, though you suspect this is probably because, if you take what he says to be true, he's lived through three times more of it than any of the rest of you. You have no cause not to believe him; after all, you can recall having magic powers. Nothing really strikes you as strange anymore.   
  
"I don't feel the pain, but I've seen a couple different versions, so it's got to have happened more than once, right? I remember you being there, once. It was really...green." Green was certainly one way to describe your second death. Second? You try to recall the first, but it's overshadowed by the same dark haze as your windy friend.   
  
"You weren't supposed to be there, Dave." You remember that much; there had been an argument, hadn't there?   
  
"Couldn't just let you go alone. What kind of bastard lets his sister take on a suicide mission by herself? Besides, I don't even know what the hell we were doing out there."    
  
You frown. You can't understand either - you had been searching for something that didn't exist. You were left standing like a fool, in the darkness at the end of the world with your brother, until everything was awash with green.   
  
What on earth did that mean? And why did Dave call it a suicide mission? "We knew we were going to die, didn't we? What about our friends? What happened to them?"   
  
"Probably kicked the bucket too," he says with a shrug. "You think that means that they're out here somewhere?" He seems calm, but there's a tension in the line of his back. You realize that if your friends are also here, living out their new twilight zone second lives, you won't be able to stop yourself from searching for them. Before Dave, you had given up hope of ever understanding that secret other part of yourself, but now that you know that you aren't insane, you feel obligated to find your comrades and reassure them of the same.   
  
_You are not alone._ This is what Dave has given you, the knowledge that you are not broken, but that even if you were, there's someone else who carries the same weight on their shoulders. You have a tether, and you hope, more than anything else, that your wayward friends do too.   
  
"Perhaps. If so, let us hope that they have found one another. We don't even know for sure that they died; it's possible that the reason we are both here now is because of our extremely verdant death." He doesn't answer. You, as well, are unsatisfied with the lack of information you have with regard to your friends' fates. But, you are certain of one thing. If that overpowering green light is the reason you've been reborn, then you are morbidly, selfishly, relieved that Dave followed you to your deaths. It is hard to die alone. Living alone is harder still.   
  
You nudge Dave gently with your elbow. "Now that we know that there's a possibility of finding them, we can keep an eye out in the future. For now, let me repay you for yesterday and treat you to a drink."   
  
He raises a pale eyebrow. "Underaged drinking? I'm downright appalled, Lalonde. Didn't take you for the type." You roll your eyes, but what he just said itches uncomfortably in your mind. You ignore the feeling for now, and head towards the little lemonade cart by the side of the road.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay I'm done for now  
> Gonna go write those 4 papers instead of sobbing about my post-scratch feelings OTL


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, since canon happened, I guess this story will eventually need Guy Fieri and ICP as character tags. But not yet! We'll get there eventually...

After another week, your parents finally decide that it's time to return to New York. They've noticed a change in your demeanor, one that you would like to think is for the better. You seem more accessible now, which they attribute to your new friend. With Dave, there's an easy sort of companionship that you've never managed to achieve before, and more importantly, when you're both trying to recover your missing parts, there's no place for social niceties. You lay everything out on the table, far past the extent that you think you'd normally be comfortable with, in both past and present lives. You depart from Texas with Dave's address and the promise to write every week.  
  
On your final day with your brother, he pulls you into a bruising, completely non-ironic hug. You allow yourself this moment of physical connection, and rest your head on his shoulder after carefully wrapping your arms around his waist. He feels thin, and yet solid under the weight of your embrace. He is real, he is real, you keep telling yourself, and you know, as well as you can know anything, that this is true. You're not prepared to leave - after all of this, for both of you to return to your isolation is painful - but you know that you won't lose touch with him. He releases you from his grip with a curt nod, and you turn to leave without looking back. You'll see each other again, and sooner rather than later, if either of you has any say in the matter.  
  
The trip down south was productive in many ways, but your headaches have not lessened. In fact, they're getting incrementally worse, and the doctors have no idea what's causing them. Stress, they say. A lack of proper sleep. Your parents are terribly distressed, and you love them for the sincerity of their care. You do love your parents, despite the fact that you'll never truly think of them as a part of your real family. It's not fair to resent them for that, so instead you choose to appreciate what you see to be genuine concern for your well-being. You know that this is likely the same exact display of emotion you received from your mother in your first life, but you'd been blinded to her intentions back then by your own insistent sense of persecution.  
  
So your parents continue to coddle you as you start another year of your education, and you accept with a minimal amount of fuss. It makes them feel better to dither, as if you've grown closer to each other in some way, and you're willing to play along. But the slight feeling of guilt you carry over information you're withholding refuses to leave you alone. However, there's nothing to be done: you are not going to compromise with your ruffled conscience over this, because you're absolutely certain that even if the doctors and your parents knew about your secret, your headaches would still persist, and you'd also probably be committed to an institution.  
  
Because you aren't just stricken with migraines. No, they're just a side act accompanying the torrent of images that assault your eyes as you try to go about your daily life. At first, it was just flashes of unfamiliar scenes, and a dull ache in your skull. But they've been building in intensity, and now, after the debilitating pain sends you to you knees, you crumple into yourself for the endless minutes that you spend watching the chaotic whir of violent events that you don't understand. This isn't the same as what happened after you met Dave; these are not memories. Having recalled your role as a Seer, you now suspect that what you're witnessing is the future, but the pain is so overwhelming that it's difficult to remember any of what you're seeing.  
  
These visions occur more frequently, and more painfully each time, coinciding with the sharpening of your dream-memories. Those are still, to some extent, annoyingly vague, but you've been seeing more and more of your friends, as well as Dave, which pleases you. You find yourself retreating to sleep more often than ever, to avoid the agony of the future being forcibly brandished onto your eyes.  
  
\--  
  
 _"You will be resigned to absolute oblivion."_  
  
Ugh, not this again. You had been hoping for a continuation of an old pesterlog with The Boy, or a nice peaceful moment with The Girl. Instead, more cryptic babble from the creepy old voyeur. You know that you played right into his hands, even if you can't remember exactly what transpired. But this conversation, which you've guessed pertains to this second life of yours, keeps replaying endlessly in your subconscious, and you would really rather that it not.  
  
 _"You will be resigned to absolute oblivion._  
 _Unless you can discover a way to preserve yourselves."_  
  
And what does that mean? You scream your frustrations into the white abyss of your dreaming mind. You hope, rather pointlessly, that you didn't lose your cool like this during the actual conversation, but here, it doesn't matter, you're allowed to be as fucking upset as you want.  
  
 _"But if you are inventive, you may find a way to survive the reset and participate in the renewed session."_  
  
You've had just about enough of this bullshit. "Alright then," you snarl back, "is _becoming a god_  inventive enough for you? Does  _immortality_  trump oblivion?" And these words have no meaning to you until you feel yourself saying them. Even as you begin asking yourself exactly when you became so delusional as to think yourself a god, the memory of your second death comes rushing back again, but this time with full clarity, and in blinding color. Your journey into the expanse of the Furthest Ring, the knowledge that you weren't going to emerge from this mission alive, the look in Dave's eyes when you both realized how badly you'd been played, the split second of light encompassing everything as you watched the birth of a sun. The rest of your chat with the manipulative creep returns to you as well, echoing with confirmation of what you're now sure of.  
  
You aren't living a second life because you died. You're here because one of your mysterious friends  _rewrote the universe_ , but the reason you  _remember_  is because your hapless entanglements in the machinations of an omniscient bastard resulted in you ascending to godhood.  
  
Which means one piece of good news, at least. If your immortality is what preserved your former life, then The Boy, as the first to become a god, should be somewhere here on Earth too. You are seized with a sense of triumph for one more puzzle solved, and perhaps a little smugness for getting that condescending voice to shut up.  
  
"Have I finally started asking the right questions?"  
  
You do not receive an answer.


End file.
